A more accurate explanation of the scare quote:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16698587
> IIRC, this was announced as part of a program that uses double-blinded crypto that allows google to perform matching against this data in aggregate (Set intersection knowledge), but not individually identity of what a given user purchased, at the same time preventing the merchants from learning the identities of individuals either.
> According to what they presented at a crypto conference, they went to great pains to avoid capturing personally identifiable transactions. The overall strategy is that Google Knows = Set A = (all ads shown for user X at Merchant Y) Merchant/Credit Card Proccessor Knows = Set B = (all $$$ paid by User X at Merchant Y), and that it is possible to cryptographically compute sum($$$ of A intersect B) without either side learning Set(User X).
> Now whether you believe in the security of the algorithm and whether there are side channel leaks or attacks is another issue.
> Edit: http://bristolcrypto.blogspot.com/2017/01/rwc-2017-secure-mp...
> About 10 minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee7oRsDnNNc
I never told Facebook to upload my cell-phone contacts to their servers, where-as with Google, I willingly store them using Google Contacts.
It's not so much the data they have, but how they obtain and use the data they have.
Google buys your credit card purchase data. Did you give it that? Why do you think Google wants you to stay logged into Chrome?
Let’s be honest here and call a spade a spade.
The world is just realizing how ads based business models work and there’s no difference between Google and Facebook.